Realtime multiplay state sync isn't remotely like CRDT, it's an endless series of hacks where you attempt to send as little data as possible to have the best pl

Realtime multiplay state sync isn't remotely like CRDT, it's an endless series of hacks where you attempt to send as little data as possible to have the best player experience as possible. Total smoke and mirrors. It's fantasy to assume a client has any real "truth" about the world over the span of milliseconds, and in practice you want the client to be as ignorant as possible because cheat programs will let people see through walls, see across the map, etc. You compensate through speculative prediction to try and make things like movement or gunshots feel lag-free, but again it's smoke and mirrors and a hundred things can cause that to go wrong. How do we resolve mis-predictions to the player? Hide it as best as possible through VFX is a great technique, or hope the users don't notice that a couple of their bullets had exactly zero effect because the server decided you shot outside the rollback buffer and didn't actually hit that other player. It's very game-dependent too. Valorant hits a 120hz tick rate through insane optimization, and if you have a low-latency connection your view of the world will be much, much more in sync with truth compared to a game like PubG that early on had a tick rate around 15hz (oof). It's always been a bucket list gamedev goal of mine to work on realtime multiplayer, but after a couple years of doing it I find myself fantasizing of a world where everyone is playing on a computer that isn't a potato with a connection that isn't jittery.